Facebook Is Down

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Social networking websites should never be down because their success comes from three factors; ease of use, accessibility, and reliability. With a good layout and good interaction, the website attracts the novice as well as the weather-beaten web surfer that’s seen it all. Accessibility is about it being easy to use on all browsers, whether mobile phones, laptops, or desktops. The third one is the key.

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One of the reasons I’ve moved away from Hotmail and yahoo is that they became slow and clogged up in spam. What this meant is you’d waste a huge amount of time waiting for pages to load and even more time deleting all the junk. That’s why I moved. Myspace is another case in point. Whilst it’s an interesting website there are several flaws such as page load time, too much freedom in layout, and more.

Facebook is currently the flagship of the social networking community worldwide because it’s simple, fast loading, and reliable. Today that has not been the case and I hope that they are not going to take too long with their upgrades. It was working fine therefore taking the website offline with no visible change in layout is just inconvenient and will see me looking for another solution… in fact, I have one. My website. This has been a constant since 1997 and has seen me through my IB, my HND, my BA, and now career building.

We’re living in a different age. Anyone can follow me on Twitter, Jaiku, Pownce, Tumblr, and one or two other websites but my flagship is my part of main-vision.com because this is where I have full control of the website. Facebook has become a very useful tool thanks to the number of people joining the website but recently they’re going through a bad period. I’m not talking about a bad period where they’re struggling to keep users or make money but rather bad in that it’s a hormonal teenager trying everything at once before gaining the stability of a mature website like Flickr after it was bought by yahoo or last.fm after CBS purchased it.

Whenever a website goes down I wonder about my future use of websites. One of the greatest things about RSS feeds is I can operate facebook remotely due to all the apps they’ve added. I add a few RSS feeds, take a few website API and it gives the impression that I’m on Facebook more than I really am.

The worst thing about social networking websites is that when they start offering a crap service you have no choice but to keep using them in order to keep in touch with what friends are doing. Last night for example I went to an event which was advertised both on Facebook and on myspace. There were not that many people but it was a practical way to keep in touch. That’s why I went to a silent disco, a silent rave, and know what others are telling us they’re doing.

I hope that this is nothing more than Facebook sneezing and that the quality of service we have grown to expect from the website resumes once more.